The principal point of the Republican Party’s domestic policy megabill — the inaptly named One Big Beautiful Bill Act — is to cut taxes. Indeed, Donald Trump and GOP lawmakers want to lock in roughly $4 trillion in tax breaks that are due to expire, while simultaneously adding new and costly tax cuts, most of which would benefit the wealthy.

It’s precisely why the party has been so brutal in proposing sweeping spending cuts to, among other priorities, health care: The Republicans’ tax cuts won’t pay for themselves, so they’re trying to offset the costs, at least a bit, by targeting programs like Medicaid.

But it would be an overstatement to claim that the GOP’s reconciliation package approach to tax policy focuses entirely on cuts, breaks and giveaways. In fact, there’s one tax that Republicans were only too pleased to increase. As USA Today recently reported:

The spending bill passed by the U.S. House increases a tax the richest private universities pay on their endowment investment gains, a move proponents say reins in “woke” schools but that critics say will wind up hurting the poorest students the most. Tucked within President Donald Trump’s massive tax and spending bill, which the House narrowly passed on Thursday, is a proposal to increase a tax that some universities pay on the investment returns of their endowments from 1.4% to as high as 21% for some of the most elite colleges in the country.

While the measure appears designed to target elite academic institutions, an analysis by The New York Times concluded that some smaller schools would get caught up in the offensive, too.

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Conservative proponents have suggested that the change shouldn’t be seen as too big a deal because university endowments’ investment returns would simply pay the existing corporate rate. But (a) that would represent a dramatic increase over the status quo; and (b) as Paul Starr explained in a smart piece for The American Prospect, “[T]he top rates on corporations and university endowments would be nominally the same, but that is a false equivalence, as corporations have access to deductions that university endowments don’t.”

As the White House’s partisan war against Harvard University helps demonstrate, the Republican Party’s multifaceted offensive against higher education in general is impossible to defend, and it threatens to destabilize one of the nation’s most valuable assets. Dan Drezner, a political scientist at Tufts University, wrote last week that the Trump administration “is trying to kill American higher education,” and while that phrasing might seem hyperbolic, there are ample data points to bolster the thesis, including the GOP plan related to university endowments’ investment returns.

With this in mind, it’s hard not to wonder if the proposed tax hikes on university endowments create a potential political liability for the party, given the pride the GOP invests in being an anti-tax party. What’s to stop Democrats from accusing Republicans of voting to raise “education taxes” or some related phrasing?